Top scientist warns against ‘hype’ as EU sets out bee rescue plan

The European Commission has published a new action plan intended to shed light on reports of declining honey-bee populations across Europe, key pollinators for many of the bloc’s important crop species.

At the same time, one the Europe’s top scientists in the field has warned against mass hysteria, pointing out that most species have experienced epidemics at one stage or another over previous centuries, ultimately with little long-term effect.

“The fact that honey-bee colonies die in large numbers is nothing strange,” the UK’s only professor in the field of apiculture, the University of Sussex’s Francis Ratnieks, told this website.

Biodiversity loss and foreign diseases do present a major challenge for Europe’s honey-bees, said professor Ratnieks, but he added there is “an awful lot of hype about bees” at the moment, stressing that humans ultimately recovered from events as traumatic as the Black Death, the 14th Century pandemic estimated to have wiped out 30-60 percent of Europe’s population at the time.